Fundraising Banquet Location Tip: Always Hold Your Banquet on the Mezzanine Level

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Well, here’s the weirdest but potentially most helpful fundraising banquet tip you’ll receive this year, courtesy of Call & Response blog:

According to a study profiled in Scientific American, people are more likely to give generously to a cause after stepping off the “up” escalator.

In fact, lest you dismiss this to flukedom, there were actually four studies about the generosity of “up” that all came to the same conclusion:

In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator. In a second study, participants who had been taken upa short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit.

A third study took yet another approach. Participants were to decide how much hot sauce to give to a participant purportedly taking part in a food-tasting study. Those who were up on the stage gave only half as much of the painfully hot sauce to the other person as did those who were sitting down in the orchestra pit.

In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground.

The report reminded me of a banquet I emceed a few years ago where the hotel elevators were on the fritz. Participants had to trudge up four flights of stairs to get to the banquet hall.

And the offering was really good that night.

No word on whether the effect holds for elevators or is diminished by forcing participants to undertake a Bataan Death March up twenty flights of stairs to the penthouse. So best be on the safe side and just opt for a generosity-spritzing escalator ride up one level to the mezzanine of the hotel for your next banquet.

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A Must-Have For Every Church in America: A Do-Good Bus

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Pastor Foley

The exact date when your church is going to go out of business has recently been charted by mathematicians, according to CNN’s Belief blog. So add this item to your church’s bucket list of ministry things to do before it goes under:

  • Acquire a Do-Good Bus to aid you in executing your responsibility to grow all the believers in your care to fullness in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As with many great discipleship ideas, this one didn’t come from the, um, church. In fact, as Alissa Walker at Good explains, The Do-Good Bus is a standalone nonprofit organization in its own right:

Co-founder Rebecca Pontius had always been involved with nonprofits, but in recent years she became flooded with questions from friends about how they could participate. “They’d say, “I want to volunteer, but I don’t know how,'” remembers Pontius, an event planner. For her birthday, Pontius organized a party bus and noticed the camaraderie created amongst her friends just by traveling to a new location together. Teaming up with two of her friends, Hannah Halliwell and Stephen Snedden, the trio decided to combine the fun of a party bus with a service trip as a way to make volunteering easy and accessible.

Part of the fun of a Do Good experience is that each destination is only revealed once volunteers board the bus, which Pontius thinks removes some of the anxiety from volunteering for the first time. “It takes away the preconceived notions or judgement about what you’re going to do,” she says. But participants don’t go into the experience blind: They’re briefed en route and also receive a training session from the organizations themselves.

In my new Whole Life Offering book, I lay out the ten ways–what the church has historically called the “Works of Mercy”–that the Bible calls us to mirror the love of Christ to our neighbors.

Why not a monthly “Works of Mercy Road Trip,” where church members board the bus (in lieu of Sunday services? Just askin’…) knowing only the name of the Work of Mercy they’ll be undertaking but not the specific destination for their service?

Of course, as the Whole Life Offering book recommends, we’ll want to train participants in that Work of Mercy in the month preceding their boarding of the bus.

Maybe if we undertake such an intentional plan for growing Christians in their love of neighbor and their love of God, then the mathematicians may be forced to revise their calculations predicting our imminent demise?

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Why the Wealthy are Stingy, and How a Nighttime Stroll Through a Dangerous Neighborhood is the Cure

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Another great post from Joanne Fritz grabbed our attention this week–Are the Wealthy Stingy? And What You Can Do About It.

Joanne’s answers:

Yes, and have them walk down a dark alley at midnight.

More on that latter answer in a moment.

First, the research. Fritz notes the 2002 Independent Sector survey we’ve talked about previously on this site, which shows that those with incomes over $100,000 a year give away 2.7% of their income whereas those with incomes under $25,000 give away 4.2%.

But what Fritz shares that is new is that wealthy people are not only stingier; they are also “less helpful and compassionate”: 

Paul Piff, who is a doctoral candidate in social and personality psychology at UC Berkeley, noticed that rich people seem to be ruder. He videotaped them in a lab situation as they got to know a stranger and found that they checked their cell phones or doodled and did not make eye contact. On the other hand, people who identified themselves as having less did make eye contact, laughed more, and nodded. They were more socially engaged than the subjects who identified as wealthier.

Piff went deeper and found that in a game where subjects were given $10 worth of points and asked how much of it they wanted to share, the richer individuals were less generous than poor people. In a trust game, they were less egalitarian and cooperative.

Lest you think that we poorer folks are immune from this effect, Piff found that people who felt just “temporarily higher” in social status were less charitable as well.

In my new Whole Life Offering book, I quote John Wesley, who noted the same phenomenon in his own day and concluded that unfamiliarity (of the rich with the poor) breeds contempt:

One great reason why the rich, in general, have so little sympathy for the poor, is, because they so seldom visit them.

Interestingly, it’s the same conclusion that researchers came to in the study Joanne cites in her post: rich people who report fewer day to day encounters with the poor tend to be a stingy lot.

Joanne notes that one foundation is implementing an interesting cure:

The key, then, may be to create such encounters for wealthy donors. The Boston Foundation is one that has started doing so. That organization takes people on walks through dangerous inner-city neighborhoods at night. The first hand experience is far more effective than just sharing crime statistics.

Be sure to check out this previous post on Pomona Hope and this report from Springwise for two other ways nonprofits are seeking to de-stingify the rich by giving them firsthand encounters with the poor–encounters where the poor are rightly portrayed not as objects of pity but as subjects of great potential.

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